No More Mr. Nice Guy

Floyd Patterson had a middleweight body, a welterweight chin and a flyweight psyche. It was not a complete package, even for the boxing doldrums bracketed by Rocky Marciano and Muhammad Ali. Consequently, over the course of a 20-year career as a heavyweight boxer, he was obliged to suffer devastating and humiliating defeats in the pursuit of only rare and paltry triumphs. And yet he became an unwitting icon all the same, remembered for a humanity that never seemed appropriate to his trade. To this day, to think of Patterson is to think of someone who was always frightened, easily shamed and mostly overmatched and who would still enter the ring, get back up and always return.

Patterson, who died last week of prostate cancer at the age of 71 (he also suffered from Alzheimer's the last eight years), was hardly a great champion, even by his own admission. But at least he was champion early (at 21, four years removed from his 1952 gold medal in Helsinki, he knocked out an aging Archie Moore) and twice (he avenged a savage beating by Ingemar Johansson to regain the championship a year later, in 1960). Mostly, of course, he was an ex-champion, losing his title again, and for good, to Sonny Liston in 1962.

This is not the preferred office of heavyweight fighters, but nobody put it to more instructive use than Patterson. He was far too sensitive to enjoy the destruction of his opponent, too vulnerable to withstand the mortification of defeat and too introspective to ignore the brutal requirements of his sport. And so he became an ideal proxy for the rest of us. Patterson was our doomed road traveler, forced again and again into the wilderness of disgrace, occasionally returning to report his findings.

Not that he couldn't fight. He had, according to Red Smith, "faster paws than a subway pickpocket," and his lunging left hook was top of the line. And he knew the game (he trained several fighters in his retirement--including his adopted son, Tracy, a bantamweight champ--and later served as chairman of the New York State Athletic Commission). But he was always undersized (he rarely weighed more than 180 pounds) and certainly of a baffling temperament. It was this last trait that was most problematic, and interesting.

Patterson was one of 11 children, brought up in the Bedford-Stuyvesant section of Brooklyn. He was so shy and quiet, and so affronted by turmoil, that his default reflex was to disappear. He spent days in darkened movie theaters, riding aimlessly on the subway, or holing up in a tool shed. "I'd spread papers on the floor, and I'd go to sleep and find peace," Patterson later told David Remnick, for his book on Ali.

He was an unlikely convert to boxing. But then Cus D'Amato, the paranoid and psychoanalyzing proprietor of the Gramercy Gym, was an unlikely trainer. With D'Amato preaching his principles of fear, and the management thereof (as he would later do with Mike Tyson), Patterson became an accomplished contender, despite his size. Still, D'Amato was often puzzled. "He just doesn't have the zest for viciousness," he complained.

Much has been made of Patterson's reaction to defeat. Even his anticipation of it. When Johansson delivered his "toonder and lightning," dropping Patterson seven times, he was plunged into a yearlong depression, the loneliness of losing almost too much. And, for the Liston fight (which President Kennedy more or less ordered him to win), Patterson packed a bag of disguises, just in case. When Liston flattened him in less than a round, Patterson availed himself of the fake beard and dark glasses, escaped Chicago's Comiskey Park and eventually flew to Madrid, where he affected a limp. As he explained to writer Gay Talese, "I am a coward."

Less well known was his reluctant violence, far more fatal to a boxer than the reconciliation of defeat. In the early going, Patterson met a journeyman named Chester Mieszala and knocked his mouthpiece out. Patterson bent to the canvas to help Mieszala retrieve it. Even in his rematch with Johansson, when the Swede deserved the full fury of retribution, Patterson was unable to muster any satisfaction. With Johansson quivering on the canvas after being knocked out in the fifth, Patterson knelt down to cradle his head and to kiss him on the cheek.

Patterson knew too much of defeat, or else experienced its loneliness too profoundly, to enjoy very much of victory, certainly of revenge. Years later, when it was Liston's turn to sacrifice his dignity at the altar of entertainment, Ali having destroyed him for good in their rematch, Patterson visited him at his hotel, an empty room that spooked Patterson as much as the knockout. He told Liston things would get better. Liston looked at him blankly for the longest time, until he recognized a fellow traveler, somebody who'd returned from disgrace but was miraculously still human. "Thanks," Liston finally said, just as Patterson was leaving the room, empty again.

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